One reason Doom succeeded so well was that it did everything it needed extremely well, and left out anything it didn't need. So it was 3D enough to look cool, had enough lighting to make things spooky, but still ran relatively fast on the hardware available.

Yes, indeed. Doom kind of perfected everything it did. With good enough hardware, it ran fluidly, looked gorgeous and had excellent yet simple and accessible gameplay mechanics. I'm not dissing Doom, it's one of my favourite games ever.

And so is Ultima Underworld... which happened to have almost the HW requirements of Doom but almost 2 years earlier and a lot more complicated gameplay, though.

Did you ever try Ultima Underworld? It was released *before* Wolf3D and was in many ways more advanced than Doom was. (Sloped ceilings and floors, up/down looking, jumping, water you could swim in, a physics model for throwing items, etc, etc)

Admitted, it's not an FPS but a first-person role playing game, but still - a game that really was years ahead of its time. And not only technologically.

So, my nVidia PCI card replaces the 64MB shared intel. My Diamond Extreme PCI provides surround sound and nice drivers that Dell didn't. My 3Com PCI provides a network connection. Another PCI card provides Firewire input because it's the only way to edit video --USB isn't even available. Oh, that card doesn't even fit, because I swapped it out for a USB PCI hub before external ones became common. Remember that old machines didn't have today's motherboard peripheral cancer that today's have. So an older machine came with barebones stuff even if it had sound.

Hmm. My previous desktop computer was from 2002 and its motherboard had integrated 5.1 sound, 100Mbit network, loads of USB 2.0 ports and at least two Firewire 400 ports. And I don't reckon it had that much of a high-end motherboard, just some random Socket 478 Abit from the local computer store.

But I have no idea what kind of crap Dell had been stuffing their computers with later than that...

Nokia is starting to push Symbian to cheaper devices that currently have the S40 operating system, which can't multitask, for instance. I hear that one of the good things about the Symbian OS is that it can be successfully run in considerably cheaper hardware than other smartphone operating systems.

I doubt Symbian is going to disappear any time soon, more likely its market share will increase - due to the S40->Symbian/S60 transition, much more (Nokia) phones can be categorized as "smartphones". And it's not like every future phone will have a touchscreen; in non-touchscreen devices, I think Symbian/S60 is still unbeatable.

People are calling Nokia a patent-troll, but Apple deserves this. They have patents on multi-touch gestures and because of that competitors (like Android) can't implement features requiring multi-touch.

That's ridiculous. There are Android phones with multi-touch gestures; stuff like that predate the iPhone by decades.